Remembering my mother

My mother died at the age of ninety-two in 2006. I’ve pretty much ignored Mother’s Day since then (my cats don’t celebrate it), but this year I found myself remembering her. She was my best friend and a delightful human being, but I never thought we had much in common:

Helen D. Buckley 1914 - 2006

My mother was athletic and competitive. In high school, another player elbowed her in the nose, breaking it. I have photos of Mum bicycling, playing golf, and at the beach in her youth. While I don’t have a picture of her playing tennis, she admitted she and a friend used to sneak into a country club to play on their court, something I would never have done.

We went to the health club (her idea) several times a week until she was eighty-eight. She also did water aerobics, and most mornings walked around the lake adjoining Seattle’s Woodland Park, about three miles. I often went with her; at five a.m., we didn’t have to compete with a lot of other walkers, bicyclists, or skateboarders, and I still had time to go home and get ready for work. Without her influence, I am more of a couch potato.

I’ve been working on the yard recently, bringing back memories of her garden in Anchorage, where we lived until I was six. Dad grew the vegetables and she planted flowers: sweet peas, snapdragons, nasturtiums, and bachelor’s buttons between the house and the septic tank. The sweet peas were smaller than those you see today, and had a sweet scent (hence, “sweet peas”). I did not inherit her gardening ability (not that she ever used it again; it must have been a one-time project). Unless a plant is actually “invasive”, I can kill it.

One year, she mentioned she was getting a refund on her income tax. When I asked if she planned to apply it to her next year’s taxes, she said meditatively, “Oh, no. I think I’ll go to Reno.” Those cheap two day excursions to Reno or Las Vegas were a favorite treat. She allotted a certain amount of money she was willing to lose (not very much!), and once it was gone, she stopped gambling, Her game was Twenty-One, a/k/a Blackjack, and she almost always broke even for her trip. I can never remember the rules of card games.

It’s only in the last few years I’ve realized that I inherited more traits from her than I thought.  

Her great gift to me was her love of reading. We went to the library every Saturday, a ritual we continued almost until I was old enough to vote, and she read to me when I was pre-literate. She did not like children’s books; her opinion of one from her youth, Elsie Dinsmore, does not bear repeating. Instead she read me young adult books and sometimes adult books as well. Note: this was in the days when books meant for adults did not contain explicit sex (or even implicit sex). I think one of them was Lorna Doone; another was about whalers, and there was one about a juvenile delinquent.

When we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, Mum went to work for the state police as a clerk/typist. She loved the job. Something interesting was always happening. Apart from the time she went to get her lunch out of the office refrigerator and found a jar of severed fingers in alcohol, there was always the prospect of bodies turning up at the spring thaw and the break-up of river ice. We lived near the Chena River. At the breakup, we used to walk down to the bank to see if we could spot one. Some people might have been appalled. It’s pretty clear where I got my bloody-minded streak.

She liked nice clothing. I have  receipts for things she bought before she married my father, at prices which seem surprisingly high for the 1940s. I think one of them was a beaver coat, which I recall from my toddler days. So soft! She also liked jewelry. Noticeable jewelry. It was always tasteful, but it was often…big. Come to think of it, I like those things, too. 

She was smart, fun-loving, spontaneous, and kind. This is the best illustration I can give:   

In her eighties, she hired a man who was going around the neighborhood looking for work. I think she had him wash the windows, as they required the use of a ladder. Afterward she asked him in for coffee and a snack. He was married, their house had burned, he was out of work, and he couldn’t afford to buy his wife a Christmas present. My mother had a Mr. Coffee she had bought on sale and put away in case hers died. She would not have cared to face morning without coffee. So she gave it to him.

Someone who heard this story at her memorial service thought she had been a patsy. But she reaped a benefit: the man’s wife wrote her a letter to thank her. It was the beginning of a correspondence that lasted after the couple moved back to the Midwest and until my mother died. There weren’t very many letters per year but each one was long and newsy. “Lola is the only person I know who writes a really good letter,” my mother said, “except me.” 

 

Her chocolate cookies summed up her attitude to life: when I asked her secret to making such incredibly good ones, she murmured vaguely, “I just put in more of everything.”

Words to live by.